Abstract

This Fossil was obtained by the Rev. Messrs. Hislop and Hunter in the sandstone at Mangali, about sixty miles south of Nagpur, as mentioned in the foregoing paper. It consists of a considerable portion of a skull, wanting chiefly the tympanic pedicles and the lower jaw. It is embedded in a block of bright brick-red compact stone, with its upper surface exposed. The skull is broad, depressed, and of an almost equilateral triangular form.

The breadth of the occiput is 4 inches 9 lines; and the lateral border of the skull measures, in a right line, 4 inches 6 lines. The muzzle is rounded and obtuse. Most of the cranial bones are impressed with radiating grooves, the intervening ridges being in some parts broken up by communicating grooves into tubercles. The orbits are entire and situated in the anterior half of the skull. Portions of small, conical, pointed teeth form a single series along the alveolar border of the upper jaw.

In investigating the structure of the occiput, the Professor succeeded in developing two well-defined occipital condyles, not so close together as in the great Labyrinthodon salamandroides, but separated as in Trematosaurus and Archegosaurus.

After a detailed description of the several parts, as far as the abraded and otherwise mutilated condition of the fossil would allow, Professor Owen states that it allows so many characters of the skull of the labyrinthodont batrachians to be determined as can leave no reasonable doubt of its true nature and affinities ; and he gives it the appellation of Brachyops* breviceps, in reference to the shortness of the facial part of the skull anterior to the orbits.

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